The Ultimate Weapon Against Terrorism: Education

The Equalizer: The Coming Revolution of Global Education

Global Education

In 2016 it looked like ISIS would overrun the Middle East.

It controlled at its peak some 110,000 sq. km. of territory in Iraq and Syria. It had attracted tens of thousands of foreign fighters. It was poised for its next big prize: Egypt.

It launched a massive media campaign by officials from 14 of its ‘provinces’, aimed at generating an uprising in the Sinai, the entry-port to the land of the pharaohs. They condemned secular Arab and Western governments, glorified successful attacks, and praised their martyrs.

It bounced off the local population. Aside from sporadic targeted attacks by ISIS terrorists from other countries, Egyptians seemed to be armor-plated against ISIS appeals.

Egypt shares a default advantage that few pay enough heed to: the educated workforce. It is a story about a tidal wave of global literacy.

In Egypt, for example, ISIS should have a massive advantage. Fifty percent of the population is under the age of 25 — ripe for enthusiastic embrace of the excitement of terrorism.

However, Egypt also has the fastest-growth economy in the Middle East.

Egypt also has the most extensive education system in the Middle East.

Those two factors are not a coincidence.

Starting around 1980, the transformation in the world, and in the lives of the poor, has been nothing short of radical, huge, and unprecedented.

The lives of more than 80 per cent of the world’s population are being transformed, within merely thirty to forty years.

In the words of Surjit Bhalla in his book “The New Wealth of Nations”, the driver that is making this happen is “In a word , education. In two words, human capital. In a sentence — the catch — up of the East with the West in terms of schooling, and therefore earning skills, and therefore incomes, which has ultimately resulted in an improvement in world inequality.”

Education overturns more than poverty. Across the world, women constituted less than 25 per cent of the world’s population attending college in 1900; in 1980, this percentage was 41 per cent; in 2014, the fraction had risen to around 48.7 percent.

In itself this has the side-benefit of population control, an important ingredient in the crucial battle against climate change. More-educated women have fewer children and more control over their lives.

A second and a less appreciated consequence will be a decline in violence, as men commit most (more than 90 per cent) crimes.

As education rises, so does progress, which in the past thirty years has been faster than ever before in terms of people and the intensity (rate of growth) .

We notice this less in in the Western world because growth has puttered along at one-fourth the rate of the previous fifty years (1951–2000). The situation is even worse because the growth has accrued to the top 1 or, at best, the top 5 per cent.

In developing countries, however, the impact has been huge. The India–China share in world output (PPP terms) is projected to reach 35 per cent, or equal to their share of population in 2028 — a phenomenon last seen more than 500 years ago. This is a good time to recall that just in 1980, the India–China world output share was less than 5 per cent.

In fact, the recent past has been witness to the greatest of transformations: the eradication of absolute poverty for over a billion people. More than a third of the world’s population was absolutely poor in 1980; less than a tenth of the world’s population is absolutely poor today.

This has been driven by the rapid expansion in schooling. In 1950, these two economies had an average educational attainment of less than three years; in 1980, this average had increased to around five, and by 2016, the average had jumped to seven-and-a-half. By 2030, most parts of the developing world should be at ten years of schooling — a level where the developed world was at just thirty-five years ago.

The amount of education (years of schooling) has a direct bearing on income, and that the decline in fertility was a direct consequence, a direct outcome, of the conscious trade-offs that parents made between the number of children that they would have, and the quality of life offered to their children.

I have drawn attention to this before but it is worth repeating: America became the richest nation in the world because it made a social investment in education that was not matched until recently.

By 1913, illiteracy in the US had dropped to less than 5%, while in Britain it was still 25%. The average school education attainment in the US was close to seven years, while in Britain, it was less than four. And the US was now the richest country in the world, with per capita incomes close to $65,000, in comparison to Britain, whose per capita income was lagging behind at $45,000.

Education is not A source of wealth, but THE source of wealth. And education is the driving force of equality.

This can be seen in a country like Egypt.

Egypt has the fastest-growing economy in the Middle East…

…which is tied to the growth in education.

Egypt’s public education system is the largest in terms of student populations in the Middle East and North Africa.

Public primary schools accommodate about 20 million students and the private primary schools accommodate around 2 million students. The total number of students in the primary stage is expected to reach 30 million by 2030.

Egypt currently has 24 public universities (with about two million students) and 26 private universities (with about 60,000 students).

There were 54 million estimated internet users in Egypt in January 2020–51% of the population of 106 million people (vs. US at 92%).

Egypt has just joined the Global Partnership for Education, which supports 90 countries in their efforts to transform their education systems. Egypt’s goal is to develop a new generation of highly qualified, competent individuals on the global stage. The education sector plan is expected to increase economic productivity and competitiveness in global markets.

Across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), several countries have made significant strides in increasing student enrollment, attendance, and completion in schools. In Egypt in particular, primary school net enrollment rates have increased from 87 percent in 2000 to 97 percent in 2018, while primary school completion rates have risen from 91 percent in 2000 to 100 percent in 2018.

Despite overall increases in school participation, on average, schooling is not always synonymous with learning. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, students miss out on roughly three years of education.

According to the World Bank, when the number of years of schooling in the MENA region is adjusted for the level of learning, the effective years of schooling are on average 2.9 less than the number of actual years of schooling A child in Egypt who starts school at age 4 would complete 11.1 years of school by her 18th birthday. However, when the quality of education is considered (i.e., how much the average student in Egypt learns per year compared to a student in a country with a more advanced education system) — the Egyptian student only learns the equivalent of 6.3 school years (i.e., 4.8 years less)

Several factors in Egypt could be improved:

First, access to schools in Egypt can be limited in certain regions and among specific populations. In Egypt’s rural areas, such as Upper Egypt, families live in small, rural hamlets which are generally located far from central village primary school.

Second, Egypt’s rapid population growth has placed enormous strains on the country’s education system. At the primary level, the total number of children enrolled has increased from 10 million in 2005 to 15 million today, while at the secondary level, the total number of children enrolled has doubled in the past two decades.

Finally, the Egyptian education system has traditionally prioritized passive learning and rote memorization over active learning, critical thinking, and creative expression among students. This results largely from the education system’s heavy emphasis on end-of-session examinations as a means for continued education, which, in turn, drives educators to often teach to the test rather than focus on overall learning outcomes. Egypt is now focusing on teaching them how to think critically, negotiate, and problem solve; embedding life skills in each subject; and making the most use of technology for learning, teaching, performance evaluation, assessment, and data collection.

There have also been educational slippages caused by political activism.

Following the 2013 military coup, students affiliated with — and sympathetic to — the Muslim Brotherhood demonstrated in public universities to demand the return of the deposed President Mohamed Morsi. Their demonstrations turned universities into a new battleground between security forces and students as Egypt’s new rulers moved to crack down on student activism.

The clampdown has been harsh.

Egypt’s ruling generals have used laws, regulations, procedures, and security tools to subdue student dissidents. The government has employed private security companies to patrol public university campuses and pushed university administrations to enforce harsh penalties against non-compliant students.

The general prosecutor has transferred hundreds of student dissidents to criminal courts and even more have remained in police detention. In the academic year following the coup, at least 14 students were killed in campus violence and hundreds arrested or suspended.

Students, however, continued to hold protests in public universities and mobilise against pro-government candidates in student unions elections.

In the first semester of the 2013–2014 academic year alone, there were 1,677 student protests at public universities.

Between 2013 and 2016, student groups protested at the ban on the Muslim Brotherhood and its designation as a “terrorist” entity. They condemned the mass killing of Muslim Brotherhood’s members and supporters in the violent dispersal of sit-ins on August 14, 2013.

Students also took bold stances regarding the security services’ implication in human rights abuses, on university campuses and elsewhere. They demanded trials for police personnel involved in murdering students during protests and the immediate release of students imprisoned and detained for political purposes, as well as those who were forcibly disappeared.

They protested in favor of freedoms — but did not themselves join ISIS.

ISIS is forced to do most of its recruiting in Egypt from the other end of the spectrum: the prisons. This has limitations. You could sign up a new terrorist — but he’s already in jail.

In late 2015 the government, through the Ministry of Higher Education, tried (relatively unsuccessfully) to exert control over the elections of student unions in public universities. The second incident came in April 2016, when students joined others in holding vigils and demonstrations to protest the signing of the maritime border agreement between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Since 2017, Egypt’s ruling generals have continued to pursue student groups that resist their clampdown and that mobilise against security interventions in universities.

The generals’ clampdown did not achieve the complete de-politicisation of public universities. It did however put a damper on educational attainment. Today the literacy rate is 80.3% for males and 63.5% for females. Special attention is now being given by the government and other NGOs to reduce gender disparity. Basic education (ages 6–14) is free, with supplementary high-school and college education depending on a student’s abilities. Applied Technology Schools help industry fill its needs; one in three Egyptian firms say that labor skill level is the major constraint of doing business in the country.

Nevertheless, in recent years, Egypt has overtaken Algeria, Jordan, and Tunisia to become the third richest Arab country outside the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), behind Libya and Lebanon.

A classroom in Cairo shows the enthusiasm that is pushing Egypt forward.

The long-term cause of this wealth is the education-driven rise of Egypt’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per person over the five decades from 1970 to 2020. Egypt’s GDP per person quadrupled during this period. Of the 112 countries with World Bank GDP per person data covering this period, only fifteen grew faster than Egypt.

Education helped Egypt diversify its economy. It also provided a new wealth source: educated people who could work outside the country and send remittances home. This has turned into the single most important source of foreign exchange for Egypt. Investment in human capital through education is a global resource.

Although Egypt’s economic growth has been a success story to date, it is slowing. As Egypt enters the ranks of middle-income countries, it must increasingly rely on the skills of its workers for economic progress, whether these are used domestically or abroad. As a result, human capital will be all-important.

The danger for Egypt — common to the danger for Western nations — is that education’s contribution to economic growth has not been accounted for in the wealth estimating system. It’s not even present at an individual level. Bloomberg’s Wealthscore for example measures your net worth, savings plan, budget and so on, but has no line-item for “education”.

As the economic historian Thomas Picketty says:

“Historically, it is the battle for equality and education that has made economic development and human progress possible, and not the veneration of property, stability, and inequality.”

Surjit Bhalla goes even further, stating that education has made the most profound impact on the world of any single factor.

The total financial wealth in the world, as estimated by Credit Suisse, was $256 trillion (2016). In the same period, the total educational wealth in the world is estimated to be $330 trillion. Educational wealth now trumps financial wealth.

It is a great equalizer, because relatively little needs to be spent to provide education.

Except in America, where it is now seen as a profit-making commodity.

From just 2006 to 2016, the cost of student debt in America rose 63%. Student debt now exceeds all other forms of debt in the US except for mortgages. There is a societal impact — only one-third of the bottom tier of income earners can afford to send a child to college — but there is another equally damaging effect: the quality of the education has not risen to match the increase in price. There has been no 63% “lift” going into the student’s educational experience.

The only people with a “lift” have been those who fund the debt.

This is a drag on the entire society — much like the braking effect involved in the healthcare sector that does not follow established best practices with automatic insurance.

At a time when the global economic race is going to be joined by billions of educated people, America is allowing a shackle to be put on its ankle.

A scary factor is that America does not seem to have an adequate appreciation of the importance of teachers or the value of education.

This is very distressing, because America has had a head start for decades. Now, at the moment when the entire world can see the advantages of education and is preparing the citizenry for a global “spelling bee’, America is seemingly uninterested in the contest.

This will catch up very quickly, because education is a driver of innovation, and innovation is responsible for 85% of all economic growth.

American corporations have show little loyalty to the mother country when it comes time to invest in a new business; it seems like it’s Open Season for any country that can offer the owners the fastest route to higher profit.

Now, they will be making decisions based on access to sufficiently educated workers.

This will call for a different corporate approach to worker education.

Fortunately, some companies are stepping up with solutions. Microsoft, for example, is now working with the Communications Workers of America to co-develop a set of principles on the adaption of AI to software games. This kind of worker-company spearhead attacking the latest technological development is exactly what is needed across the board.

Because education does not finish in the classroom — the classroom is only the launch-pad for a lifetime of learning.

If America can get its college spending under control by taking the corporations out of the graduate process, it has an amply demonstrated ability to rapidly adapt to a new world of new needs.

Just as Egypt is doing. The ancestors of the young students today in Ancient Egypt learned reading, writing, mathematics and religious instruction under the shadow of the newly-built pyramids. Today the shadows are still there, and the young minds are still eager, and their homework is still a pain. But their importance has grown, because they are the new foundation for their country’s wealth.

And if we are in a global competition of educational systems, so be it. It beats war. And we can all learn from each other.

That’s a world that will put pyramids on the moon. The ancients would approve.

And recruiting for ISIS will continue to plummet.

And we will all approve.